Zarid

Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a postmodern novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. It was published in Italy in 1972 by Giulio Einaudi Editore. The book is framed as a conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, and Marco Polo. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo, many of which can be read as commentary on culture, language, time, memory, death, or human experience generally. Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino’s use of combinatory literature, and shows influences of semiotics and structuralism. In the novel, the reader finds themself playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book. The book has nine chapters, but there are also hidden divisions within the book: each of the 55 cities belongs to one of eleven thematic groups. The reader can therefore play with the book’s structure, and choose to follow one group or another, rather than reading the book in chronological chapters.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a 2022 novel by Gabrielle Zevin. The novel follows the relationship between two friends who begin a successful video game company together. Set over the course of several decades, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows video game developers Sadie Green and Sam Masur, childhood friends who reunite while both studying at universities in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Along with Sam’s roommate and friend Marx Watanabe, Sam and Sadie begin developing a video game and later co-manage a successful video game studio, Unfair Games. In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Magical realism, magic realism, or marvellous realism is a style or genre of fiction and art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between speculation and reality. Magical realism is the most commonly used of the three terms, and refers to literature, in particular, with magical or supernatural phenomena presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting, and is commonly found in novels and dramatic performances. In his article ‘Magical Realism in Spanish American Literature’, Luis Leal explains the difference between magic literature and magical realism, stating that, ‘Magical realism is not magic literature either. Its aim, unlike that of magic, is to express emotions, not to evoke them.’ Despite including certain magic elements, it is generally considered to be a different genre from fantasy because magical realism uses a substantial amount of realistic detail and employs magical elements to make a point about reality, while fantasy stories are often separated from reality.

Darklands is a historical fantasy role-playing video game developed and published by MicroProse in 1992 for MS-DOS. The game is set in the Holy Roman Empire during the 15th century. While the geographic setting is historically accurate, the game features many supernatural elements. Darklands features an early example of open world gameplay in role-playing video games. The player is free to complete quests that will give them a positive reputation, or to pursue a negative reputation by performing evil deeds. The player’s reputation may vary across geographic boundaries, allowing the player to be simultaneously hated in one region and exalted in another. The setting for Darklands is medieval Europe. All of the cities that one’s party may visit in the game are real places that existed in the Holy Roman Empire of the 15th century.

Futurism (Italian: Futurismo) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and, according to its doctrine, ‘aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past.’ Important Futurist works included Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni’s 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla’s 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).

Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions. A key feature of rewilding is its focus on replacing human interventions with natural processes. Rewilding enables the return of intact, large mammal assemblages, to promote the restoration of trophic networks. This mechanism of rewilding is a process of restoring natural processes by introducing or re-introducing large mammals to promote resilient, self-regulating, and self-sustaining ecosystems.

The Sonoran Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Sonora) is a hot desert and ecoregion in North America that covers parts of the northwestern Mexican states of Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur, as well as part of the Southwestern United States (in Arizona and California). It is the hottest desert in Mexico. It has an area of 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 sq mi). In phytogeography, the Sonoran Desert is within the Sonoran floristic province of the Madrean region of southwestern North America, part of the Holarctic realm of the northern Western Hemisphere. The desert contains a variety of unique endemic plants and animals, notably, the saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea) and organ pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi). The Sonoran Desert is clearly distinct from nearby deserts (e.g., the Great Basin, Mojave, and Chihuahuan deserts) because it provides subtropical warmth in winter and two seasons of rainfall (in contrast, for example, to the Mojave's dry summers and cold winters). This creates an extreme contrast between aridity and moisture.

Monstera deliciosa, the Swiss cheese plant or split-leaf philodendron is a species of flowering plant. The common name ‘Swiss cheese plant’ is also used for the related species from the same genus, Monstera adansonii. The common name ‘split-leaf philodendron’ is also used for the species Philodendron bipinnatifidum. The names in Spanish (costilla de Adán), Portuguese (costela-de-adão), and French (plante gruyère) refer to the change of the leaves from entire to fenestrated, comparing it in the first two cases with the ribs of Adam and in the third with the hole-filled gruyère cheese. In Mexico, the plant is sometimes referred to as piñanona. In coastal regions of Sicily, especially Palermo, it is called zampa di leone (lion’s paw).